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I think for me this is one of the best deals of the whole Black Friday / Cyber Monday mumbo-jumbo. There are a couple of promos that can be combined to get some huge discounts:

Discounted Gift Cards at Staples

FrequentMiler has a quick simple post on it. The key point to note is that the transaction limit is not being enforced at all. I recently moved into a new house so I have been focusing on the Lowes gift cards. If you buy one $50 gift card it will cost $40, if you buy two it will cost $80, if you buy 10 it will cost $400… all under the same transaction. While not tested I am going to assume it’s the same for JC Penney ones too. If you need to buy $400 worth of Dominos Pizza GC’s you have other issues 🙂

So this gives you a 20% discount at Lowes or JC Penney. I’m not familiar with JCP but 20% off at Lowes is hard to come by. GC resellers like Raise typically over discounts of around 6-7%. Now I should note someone has pointed out in the comments of FM’s post that Raise are currently not buying Lowes cards, presumably because of a flood from this deal, but if you can float them for a while you ought to be able to sell them at a profit in time.

Stack Option 1 – Chase Ink

The obvious stacking option is to buy with Chase Ink cards to earn 5x. With a conservative $0.0125 valuation that means you are getting a further 6.25% discount. In theory you can get another 1% from Visa Edge which I understand is going away but still here right now.

Stack Option 2 – Amex $20 off $100 Offer

This one is a YMMV but check your Amex offers for a $20 off $100 at Staples offer. Normally I don’t luck out on these targeted offers but I managed to find it on 10 of my Amex cards! Now combining with the Lowes deal is imperfect as you need to buy 3 $50 cards in one transaction to get over $100 (you could buy 2 for $80 and then add other stuff to get to $100). But buying 3 $50 for $120, with a further $20 Amex credit now puts you at a whopping 33.33% discount at Lowes. That’s real savings!

Stack with Cashback Portals – JCP @ 15%

You can get further savings by ordering goods through online portals. For example Ebates has a special of 15% cashback at JCP today. Again I am not familiar with JCP but I can’t believe you can’t make good use of this kind of discount at that store.

One potential issue is the number of gift cards you can use in one transaction. I have not tried either lowes.com or jcpenney.com so can’t comment on that. I did manage to run 14 gift cards at a Lowes register in store without any issue at all, this was for a custom blinds order which I could not have ordered online anyway (and Lowes portal offers are not so strong anyway). Leave a comment if you know what the limits are on either website.

So go at it and enjoy! Oh and sorry to everyone in the Raleigh area, I have already wiped out three stores worth of Lowes $50 and $25 GC’s. There is one $25 left at Brier Creek 😉

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Well there you be! Good timing for me as I got this email post while eating lunch across the street from a Staples by work. I was going in to get some Visa cards (what else to do when one has a few minutes to kill during lunch and a Walmart with a kiosk on the route home!) so I picked up 8 50’s and 4 25’s for $500 worth of Lowe’s cards for $400! I didn’t even think of this deal though I saw it in Gregs post. Being able to put all of that on one ticket made it easy – there will always be reasons to spend money at Lowes so it cannot go to waste. 2500 UR points and $5 extra from VisaSavingEdge didn’t hurt either!
I was still drunk from spending my 67 AMEX cards Saturday and needed a hit before I got a hangover so thank you!